Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Some bugs are less important than others, and there's always a certain background noise of bugs that aren't complete deal-breakers. And there are always more of those to fix than I have time for.

Every once in a while, I sweep through a list of open bugs and try to address as many as possible. Given the time constraints, I have a limited attention span for each bug. Anything that wastes time reduces the chance of a bug getting fixed. The bugs that tend to get fixed (or at least considered) are the ones with attachments: an xorg.conf, Xorg.log and whichever xorg.conf.d snippets were manually added. Always helpful is an evtest log of the device that's a problem.

If it takes me 10 comments to get useful log from a bug reporter because they insist on philosophical discussions, ego-stroking, blame games, etc., chances are I've used up the allocated time for that bug before doing anything productive. And I've had it happen often enough that reporters eventually attached useful information but I just never went back to that bug. Such is life.

So, in the interest of getting a bug fixed: attach the logs and stay on-topic. If something is interesting or important enough to have a philosophical discussion about it, then we can always start one later.